A Mother's Love
by Troph
Summary: Catelyn confesses her sins. An adaptation of the pocks story from season 3.


Catelyn's fingers were stiff and pained as she wound the bark through the twigs of her Mother's Charm. It was not as elegant or colorful as the others she had made from silk and needles, but she hoped the gods wouldn't mind. The elements of the woods, after all, were closer to the gods than the inventions of man ever have been. At least, that's what she hoped in her aching heart, as she worked desperately at the Charm with aching fingers.

She looked up at the sound of trotting hooves and saw Talisa riding on the sleek, white mare Robb had given her as a wedding present. Catelyn still felt a twinge of disappointment and anger when she saw her new daughter-in-law. Robb had driven away many allies with this marriage. It might even have cost them the war, if the Freys couldn't be bargained with. But then, it was hardly Talisa's fault that Robb had been foolish.

The Queen of the North called for her mare to stop, but it didn't head the lady's warning immediately. Two of Catelyn's guards took the reins from her and helped her off.

"You're afraid of her," Catelyn told her. "And she knows it."

"I'm not afraid of her," Talisa insisted. Catelyn said nothing, only returning to her Mother's Charm. "May I help you, Lady Stark?"

"No." Catelyn winced at her own cruelty, the cool sharpness in her voice, like an icepick. It was bad enough the girl had been taken from her home, thrown into a war she had no part of before now. Did Catelyn have to now make her feel unwelcome?

Talisa began to step back. "I'm sorry, I shouldn't have- "

"You can't help," Catelyn explained, softer now, "because a mother makes one for her children to protect them." Her eyes flicked down to the Queen's belly, the roundness of child barely perceptible to anyone who wouldn't know to look. "Only a mother can make them."

"You've made them before?" Talisa sat beside Catelyn on the fallen tree, though several feet away from her.

"Twice," Catelyn replied, running another thread of bark through the intertwining sticks.

"Did they work?"

Catelyn paused, looking up from her work, remembering. "After a fashion," she said. "I prayed my son Bran would survive his fall. Many years before that, one of the boys came down with the pocks. Maester Luwin said if he made it through the night he'd live. But it would be a very long night. So, I sat with him through the darkness, listened to his ragged little breaths… his coughing, his whimpering." Catelyn heard her own voice grow ragged, recalling the tiny naked thing in his crib, dotted with boiling red marks and crying out in pain and confusion.

"Which boy?" asked Talisa. Catelyn almost couldn't bring herself to look at her.

"Jon Snow," she confessed. That one confession seemed to open a floodgate, a dam of thoughts and feelings she had held for years bursting open to this girl's questions.

"When my husband brought that baby home from the war I couldn't bear to look at him," she went on, sins pouring from her as if she were speaking with a maester. "I didn't want to see those brown, stranger's eyes staring up at me. So, I prayed to the gods: 'Take him away, make him die!'" Catelyn had to steady herself; she could feel tears prickling the back of her eyes. "He got the pocks… and I knew I was the worst woman who ever lived. A murderer. I'd condemned this poor, innocent child to a horrible death. All because I was jealous of his mother. A woman he didn't even know." Tears of shame threatened to fall, but she held them in. She was a Stark; she would not come to pieces in front of her son's men. She pressed on. "So, I prayed to all seven gods: 'Let the boy live. Let him live and I'll love him. I'll be a mother to him. I'll beg my husband to give him a true name. To call him Stark and be done with it. To make him one of us.'"

"And he lived?" Catelyn turned to face Talisa, her big brown eyes filled with… something. Curiosity to hear the end of the story? The desperate hope that the story could have a happy ending? She couldn't say.

"And he lived." Catelyn looked away again. "And I couldn't keep my promise." She closed her eyes, unable to see the look on Talisa's face. "And everything that's happened since then, all this horror that's come to my family… it's all because I couldn't love a motherless child."

With those words, Catelyn felt eighteen years of shame and regret crashing down on her shoulders all at once. Eighteen years she could've hugged and kissed him. Eighteen years she could've held him as he cried. Eighteen years she could've given him a smile, told him she was proud of him. Eighteen years he could've had somebody to call mother.

Eighteen years he could've been happy. And she had denied him even that.

She dared to once more open her eyes and look at Talisa, the girl who would soon become a mother herself. She had expected revulsion at her actions. She had hoped for understanding, an assurance that she was not as bad as she thought herself. What she found as a pair of eyes that would not meet hers and a look of contemplation on the new Queen's face. Catelyn supposed that was fine; she didn't want her judgement and she didn't deserve her sympathy. It was a merciful act of justice, one that she would have to except.

She turned back to the Mother's Charm and her mind was carried to the North, past Winterfell, along the Kingsroad, to the Wall. To Jon Snow. Amid a harsh winter. And in the company of harsher men. Catelyn wondered if the gods would accept a Mother's Charm for a boy who had no mother to speak of.


End file.
